How Much is That Green Bean in the Window?
Anyone around my age remembers when even SUPER supermarkets were not all that big. The average grocery store was more like the size that G&R was, and you could find everything you needed in there. How were they able to fit everything into such a small space? That is what today’s column is about.
Somewhere back in my professional history, I remember hearing a sudden rise in the use of the buzzword “value-added” as applied to agricultural products— food. This was before the internet and as there was no easily looking up what “value added meant, I figured it out. Here is an example: We grow and sell green beans—fresh green beans, frozen green beans, and green beans in a can. Back when I was a kid, the fanciest form of packaged green beans you could get was a three-bean salad in a can. What “valueadded” means is that now you can get frozen green beans with a dab of seasoned butter in the bag, too, so you can just dump it in a pan, cover it, and come back to cooked, seasoned, buttered green beans. Heck, now you can even just pop the whole bag in the microwave then dump the cooked beans out onto your plate. You can even get frozen battered green beans that you can fry in oil or in your air-fryer. Here is an eye opening exercise you can do—go to even a small grocery store and find every iteration of green beans the store has and count up how many you find. I can promise you it will be exponentially more that the three versions that existed when I was a kid.
Value-added was meant to help market and sell agricultural products. I surmise it came about because there were hardly any stay-at-home moms any more, so who was going to wash and clean fresh green beans then make seasoned butter in which to cook them? Plain frozen and plain canned made life easier, but people were eating in restaurants more and wanting foods that had more seasoning and different preparations. Value-added meant that we could make that easy for them and in the process sell more agricultural products. That led to more variations on every single food product and the need for more shelf space and bigger and bigger stores. Here is another example—when I was a kid, if your mom wanted a shortcut, she could buy Kraft Macaroni and Cheese in that blue box with the orange cheese powder. Go to your nearest grocery store and see how many different versions of Mac and Cheese they have now. A quick search on my grocery store app says a hundred and forty.
Here is the big problem, value- added also means cost-added and usually means more highly processed and additive-added. I just looked on my favorite grocery store’s app and found that a twelve ounce bag of plain frozen green beans is $1.48 or twelve cents an ounce, while the same size bag of green beans with a sprinkle of garlic powder, a little parmesan cheese, some olive oil (and several other more mysterious ingredients) is twice the price at $2.98 or twenty-five cents an ounce. And for an even more value-added version, an eleven ounce bag of “Brown Butter Green Beans” is $4.48 or forty-one cents per ounce. Oh wait! They also have roasted garlic in them and they are gluten-free, which plain green beans are anyway. By the way, fresh, pre-bagged green beans are eleven cents an ounce.
I will be back in a couple of weeks with another installment of this food-cost, healthy-food series. In the meantime, if you have a question or request, you can always reach me at Spring-CreekArtsGuild@gmail.com.